The Public Isn't Interested In A Sex Trafficking Scandal Involving Presidents And The Royal Family (An Imagined Newsroom Conversation)

 A young reporter rushes into the editor's office.

 Reporter: I’ve got a great story, Ed. This one’s got it all. It’s got sex, it’s got kidnapping, it’s got international intrigue. It’s got compelling human drama. Best of all, it’s got really huge names attached to it. It’s got everything you can imagine.

Editor: Calm down, Joe. Let’s approach this carefully. You might be on to something but we need to game plan this. The first question we ask in journalism is “who”. Are there any politicians involved? Even tangentially? They don’t have to be directly involved but we could use a known name in the headlines to get people’s interest.

 Reporter: I’ll say it has politicians involved! Not just politicians, actual FREAKING Presidents of the United States.

 Editor: Can it be confirmed by anonymous sources from any intelligence agencies?

 Reporter: It’s better than that, Ed. Something actually happened. Like there's actually tangible verifiable evidence. Actual witnesses. Real live people. There are pictures. of the current president. Standing next to an actual international sex trafficker. And flight logs showing a former president actually flew on the sex trafficker’s private plane! Dozens of times!

 Editor: Any connection to Putin?

 Reporter: Well, no…But even better! We’ve got a member of the Royal Family involved in this. You know how people love any scandal involving the Royal Family. This is going to be crazy huge!

 Editor: This member of the Royal Family, has he been to Russia in the last few years?

 Reporter: Uh…I don’t know. Anyway, forget about him for now. This sex trafficker, he’s got ties to Bill Gates. Bill Freaking Gates!

 Editor: I don’t know, Joe. I’ve got to go with my gut on this one and I’m not feeling any heat about this story. I want you to follow up on the Russian spy porpoises story. Any new leads on that?

 Reporter: Nobody cares about the Russian spy porpoise story, Ed. People thought it was stupid. I was embarrassed to have my name attached to it. Besides, only Democratic voters cared about it at all. This story about the international sex trafficker, now, EVERYBODY will want to know about this. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or third party. It doesn’t matter if you’re not even into politics. And the best part, Ed, the best part is that nobody else is covering it. We’ve got this scoop all to ourselves. All we have to do is a little digging.

 Editor: Sorry, I just don’t think the public is interested in tawdry stories like this. Our readers are too sophisticated to get pulled into something so lurid. Anything breaking on the possible existence of videos of Russian prostitutes peeing on Trump?

 Reporter: Ed, there’s been nothing new on that story in the last four years. There never was any evidence, it was just rumor. But it’s indisputable that something really happened with this story. All we have to do is a little digging and we are certain to find gold.

 Editor: Sounds a little too “dog bites man” to me.

 Reporter: Are you kidding me?

 Editor: Trust me, I’ve been in the news business for twenty years. I’ve seen this kind of story come across my desk every few months.

 Reporter: No, you haven’t. And I’m not going back to the last assignment you gave me about Russian agents sowing discord on Instagram by promoting sex toys. I’m telling you, this story has legs and it’s going to be huge. We’ve got to run with it.

 Editor: I don’t know, maybe you’re seeing something I’m not. Is there an angle I’m missing here?

 Reporter: I didn’t even have a chance to tell you the really crazy part. This international billionaire sex trafficker who’s tied to hugely rich and influential people? He seemingly was allowed to kill himself before the truth could come out. It’s like Ruby killing Oswald except the cameras weren’t working this time.

 Editor: You say he killed himself?

 Reporter: Allegedly.

 Editor: But there wasn’t any video of him doing it, like with Trump and the Russian prostitutes?

 Reporter: I don’t think there’s any video of that either. But there was supposed to be two video cameras monitoring his cell and neither one was working.

 Editor: Any of the guards see anything?

 Reporter: The guards were negligent and didn’t check on the prisoner like they were supposed to.

 Editor: Wait a minute…I think I see an angle, a way we could make this a story worth reporting on.

 Reporter: You let me know boss, and I’ll start digging into it.

 Editor: Right. Okay, got it. I want you to see how independent journalists and people on social media are covering this and we can do a story about how quick conspiracy theories start.

 Reporter: Right away boss! Wait…What?!

    If you liked what I write enough to support me, you can buy me a coffee. If you liked it but don't have a credit card handy, please share. Also, follow me on Twitter or Facebook, sign up for my newsletter, or check me out on Amazon.

 

 

 

My Parents Taught Me Not To Waste. Television, Not So Much.

 We noticed our kitchen garbage was smelling pretty bad and needed to be taken out. So right away my wife and I looked around the house for any waste paper baskets we could fill up the bag with. After that we went through the fridge to clear out any old food containers. It was only once we had a full garbage bag that it occurred to us: we could have just taken out a mostly empty bag.

 But it hadn’t occurred to us. That’s not how we were raised. A garbage bag had to be crammed full before you took it outside. It was just…the way.

A while before that happened, I found myself doing something I realized my parents would be proud of me for. I wasn’t accomplishing anything that would bring renown to the family name. What I was doing was making a peanut butter sandwich. But the part I felt they would approve of was that I was using a spatula to get the last bits of peanut butter out of the jar. Because that’s what they taught me to do when I was young and it was something I at that time resisted. Because it made extra work for me. But that was the reality they grew up in, both of them being raised during the depression when waste was not an option.

 Thrift was an inconvenient idea for people of my generation. We had so much in the way of material possessions and cheap goods it really was easier for us to throw something away and just get a new one. We were a generation torn between an older way of doing things and a new one.

 I don’t know about people younger than myself, but anyone my age or older experienced it: that moment when you brought an appliance or an electronic device to a repair shop to have it fixed, only to be told that it would be cheaper to buy a new one than repair it. We all felt the wrongness of it. But in the end, we were all taught to save a buck wherever possible. But we knew, we knew, that it shouldn’t be this way. We knew we were participating in a system that didn’t make sense. And yet we trusted the system, trusted progress, trusted authority…we trusted something. Because up until then it made sense to trust, because the system was working and it seemed like we were progressing and those telling us to trust didn’t seem all that scary.

  But that trust we had in a system has led us to where we are today. We live in a society where half the food we grow is wasted while the great lakes are being turned into dead zones due to the extensive fertilizer used to grow food we don’t even eat. We live in a society where people rent storage units to hold the possessions they don’t have room for. And the real cost for all the waste we engage in is finally becoming unavoidable.

 If I could tell one thing to young people today it would be what my parents told me. And their parents told them and so on, back into prehistory. Do not take what you do not need, do not take seconds until you are sure everyone else got a first serving. If you put something on your plate, you eat it. Do not waste because there are others in the world who do not have enough. Do not throw things away that are still good just because you want something better. The Baby Boomer generation hated the “There are kids starving in China” line, but that is only because the television spent more time raising them than their parents. An entire generation was hijacked by Madison Avenue to go against everything every adult ever tried to instill into their young.

 We have had it drilled into our heads that individual decisions and actions do not matter, but they do. They matter because values matter. This was never in contention until radio and television and the internet ushered in a new value system that served advertisers. It was a value system that was in direct opposition to what every parent tried to instill into their children until the time when advertisers had more influence on children than their own parents. That shift happened about the time when I was a child and television had established its place in American households. Let us be clear that what was established was an usurpation of corporate values over human values. It is the difficult but necessary task of each of us to overturn the values coup and reassert human values once more.

 The values we live by in our everyday lives have a ripple effect. They change not only the way we live our individual lives but also the way we perceive how society should be run. We need to live our values in order for them to be translated into society at large. The big changes society needs, which we know it needs, will not come about of their own accord. They will not come about when the right people are elected or the right technology becomes available. And it sure won’t come about through the media. It will come about when people live out simple but timeless values.

 It’s time to take the stinky garbage bag of corporate values to the curb.

   If you liked what I write enough to support me, you can buy me a coffee. If you liked it but don't have a credit card handy, please share. Also, follow me on Twitter or Facebook, sign up for my newsletter, or check me out on Amazon.